[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Billi

Are you sure? I don't know much about US law but I would be surprised if it differs very much from German law in this case. In my opinion, your scenario has nothing to do with copyright but is covered by these parts of the law that deal with situations where parents act for their teenage children. And of course you can buy anything for/in the name of your daughter and give it to her, even ebooks..

US law dealing with children is severely lacking in coherence. In some areas, they're treated like property that belongs to the parents--they can't decide where to live or get a job or even what to read and what church to attend, and parents are liable for the consequences of their crimes. On other areas, they're wards of the state; if the parents' choices are considered too weird or harmful, the state demands the right to make those decisions instead. (In some cases, this is valid; in others, it's religious discrimination or other invasion of family rights.)

What rights minors have to own property, including money, are unclear. That their parents are expected to provide for their welfare is certain; whether that includes "buy books/software/services registered entirely to parent" is unclear. And the digital contracts that have sprung up all over the internet have been entirely oblivious to this--there's an unspoken understanding that of course kids in a household can use digital things bought for that household, but it's only spelled out in detail on kid-oriented products.

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

To quote a certain police captain: "Just because you say it with conviction, doesn't make it so!" You don't know how many people pirate files, buy files, pirate only because they couldn't find a legit file, or buy legit because they couldn't find a pirate file. And "most are never read" is NOT the same as "none are ever read." You can't make an absolute statement out of suppositions and estimates.

Neither can the publishers. Claiming they've "lost billions" due to pirated content is lying; they're claiming they can track how much money would've been spent if the pirate files weren't available Saying "some would have been bought!" is easily countered by "some people got the first one pirated, and bought the next few in the series."

The fact that the heaviest-pirated books are the biggest sellers supports the second theory. That doesn't make it legal--but does make it hard to claim it's causing economic damage.

But a review of a book isn't recounting the entire book, it is its own original product; so it's not bound by the laws governing redistributing the entire book.

By that logic, fanfic, unauthorized sequels, and spinoff movies would all be legal. They aren't quoting the whole original, and they're new works.

And indeed, some sequels & spinoffs have been ruled to be legally fair use; others have been ruled infringing. There is no hard line for how much can be copied & reused by someone else.

Yes, we agree on this (alert the media). Copyright was formed using existing "property" metaphors in the first place... and that was probably a mistake--a minor mistake, which did little harm at the outset, but which has gotten to be larger and more troublesome over time thanks to corporate manipulation. Now, we are trying to apply a metaphor-mistaken statute to electronic files, a wholly new entity that was unheard-of when the original copyright laws were formed.

It wasn't unheard of the last time copyright laws were edited; the corporations who wanted the power-grab of extending their monopolies just didn't want to pay attention. There's no sign, in the newer talks about copyright, that they're paying attention now to digital realities--they talk about streaming like it's inherently different from downloading, like it's not "download-and-erase." They refuse to acknowledge that every web page is copied by every reader.